In Lost, Writers Could Get Voted Off Island

September 21, 2005|By Lorne Manly The New York Times

On Lost, one of last season's most successful series, some four dozen plane crash survivors confronted a Pacific island infused with mystery.

A monster devoured a pilot. A polar bear rampaged through the jungle. An enigmatic paraplegic could walk again. The first season ended last May with dual cliffhangers: Two characters peered down a hatch they had found, only to be greeted by the spooky darkness of an unending vertical shaft, while another group of characters, attempting an escape by raft, were thwarted by scary strangers who sailed off with a child.

But the biggest puzzle the producers of Lost face as they enter their second season tonight may well be how to avoid alienating the audience that has made it one of ABC's first water-cooler hit dramas in more than a decade.

The creators of shows like Lost -- serialized dramas steeped in their own elaborate mythologies -- face a dilemma. Audiences compulsively desire, even demand, answers. But reveal too much, too soon, and the tension is broken: Once Laura Palmer's killer was identified partway through the second season of Twin Peaks, all that was left was a show that had descended largely into camp, a mere procession of dancing dwarves, inscrutable owls and log ladies. Or dole out only tiny hints about how the pieces fit together, and viewer obsession can curdle into frustration or even disdain, as happened in the latter years of The X-Files.

"Twin Peaks looms large to me as cautionary tale," said Carlton Cuse, who joined Lost as an executive producer early last season. "That was a show where the mythology sort of overwhelmed everything else, principally the construction of believable, plausible characters. It's constantly a presence in my mind about something we can't get sucked into doing on this show."

Added Damon Lindelof, the writing partner of series creator J.J. Abrams, "It's all about character, character, character. ... Everything has to be in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show."

The writers had planned, for example, to ratchet up the animosity between two characters, Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau) and Jin-Soo Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim), while developing a romance between Michael and Jin's wife, Sun (Yunjin Kim). But they became invested in the married couple's relationship as they developed their back story in Korea. Meanwhile, as Perrineau and Kim became good friends on the set, the creative team sought to exploit the chemistry between them, even though their characters did not speak the same language. "When we see stuff we like, we write to it," Cuse said. "We're viewers with control."

But the creators do know how the series ends. The survivors will not learn they are part of some dastardly experiment, or discover they are in purgatory, or wake up from a bad dream. "These guys get off the island," said Cuse.